TigerHawk

TigerHawk (ti*ger*hawk): n. 1. The title of this blog and the nom de plume of its founding blogger; 2. A deep bow to the Princeton Tigers and the Iowa Hawkeyes; 3. The nickname for Iowa's Hawkeye logo. Posts include thoughts of the day on international affairs, politics, things that strike us as hilarious and personal observations. The opinions we express are our own, and not those of each other, our employers, our relatives, our dead ancestors, or unrelated people of similar ethnicity.

Monday, November 08, 2004

Election maps

By TigerHawk at 11/08/2004 04:57:00 AM

The Big Picture has a fascinating round-up of links to "election maps". Some of them are very illuminating, and demonstrate grahically that the presentation of data can have an enormous influence on how we perceive it. For example, dedicated TigerHawk readers will remember this map, to which I linked a few days ago. It shows America in Red and Blue by county on a winner-take-all basis. Now look at a red/blue map by state, with the morphology distorted to show relative population. The Bush sweep in the first map shrinks to the much closer election that it was. And if you think that all this red/blue winner-take-all coloration makes no sense, look at this map of "Purple America." Finally, here's a 3D look at the almost unbelievable dominance of the Democrats in the big cities, and their complete failure elsewhere.